It was hours later when he woke. His sleep was without dreams, for all he could recall. The television was still playing, but there was only static. Moonlight beamed like a ferocious spotlight into the apartment. He saw the night was absent of mist or cloud, yet as he wrapped himself up in his coat and hat and hid his garbling foreign phone from any possible onlooker, he felt that the air outside was still intoxicatingly humid. Yet, he supposed, it could merely be the contrast to his apartment. His eyes were still stinging from staring at the screen for hours on end, and he even had a slight dread that he had slept with his eyes open towards the static.

Like a gaunt somnambulist he trudged through the night, draped in black and with bloodshot eyes probing every corner for the silhouette of a ghostly figure in green. Instead, he found another figure huddled in an alleyway. Before him was a sick, shivering man in formal black attire, partly bandaged, who, as he approached the man, stood up from his vomiting and glanced around nervously before hurrying along the street. As the figure stumbled away from the corner, the phone in his pocket began to spasm and through it he heard the unstable panting and sniffing and gulping and convulsing of the sick man. The man hobbled stiffly and slowly, as if half-dead, sometimes even keeling over and folding almost in half on the pavement. As the man did so beneath the lamppost in front of him, he could hear the whimpers that were indicative of a suppressed sob, shuddering through the phone that was now in his hand. It was clear to him that it was the same agitated, frightened, and dreadfully ill man in tattered and torn bandages from the black bus. His assignment was clear.

He continued to follow the sick man to his apartment block, one that seemed to be a virtual copy of his own and watched as the man crawled up the stairs more like a wounded, growling animal than a grown man, and he watched as above him the light to the fourth floor apartment lit up flickering and pale above him. He spied the snaking pipes beneath the window, and mustering all his remaining strength and dexterity, climbed up the scaly rusting metal. He peered inside the window to see a withered flower atop the windowsill, bedsheets flung all across the room, and discarded, bloody bandages slain across the floor. The man had collapsed on the slashed remains of his bed, face down, outstretched like a shuddering starfish. The window was open, and he saw that in this apartment also the ventilation and fans were all broken, and the room stank of something ghastly. Yet unlike his own room, this apartment was oozing with sizzling heat, to the point where paint was dripping languidly from the walls and ceiling like the final squirts of blood from a slashed artery. Seeing that the sick man still did not move, he lifted the window up as far as it could go, and slinked slowly into the room. Once he had crept onto the floor, utilising the bandages and bedsheets to soften his step, he stood up and looked down upon the quivering fool beneath him. He breathed slowly, but suddenly a cough caught his throat by surprise, provoked in all likelihood by the baking heat and foul stench of the place. Below him, the man suddenly stirred, howling and moaning like a disemboweled ape, writhing on the bed. Startled, he stumbled backwards and fell into the bathroom behind him.

He found himself lying on top of a thick black bin-bag, and unable to get to his feet. There were what felt like a collection of moldy fruit beneath him, rigid and heavy yet in some areas hollow, liquified, and soft, but not shaped like fruit he had ever encountered. As he squirmed, he tore open the bag they were concealed in, to reveal the decaying, maggot infested, divided corpse of a woman, her still bulging eyes and gaping, blood-stained mouth greeting him with an expression of maniacal terror that matched his own erupting visage. He stumbled backwards once more, seeing heap after heap of discarded bandage and shards of a shattered mirror scattered across the room, along with what appeared to be blank, broken videotapes and discs, resembling those he saw at the old merchant’s stand, and which gave him a recording of his own dreams. Without a further thought he stammered up to his feet, clutched the thick, weighty phone tightly in his fist, kicked away the bathroom door, and charged, screaming like a banshee, leaping like an unchained monster towards the sick pathetic figure that was still writhing on the bed and mumbling and sobbing inaudibly into his pillow.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

As he pinned the man down and began to bludgeon him with the phone, hammering away hysterically at the sweating scalp of his victim, the man only continued to sob in the same manner he had before. It was not a sob of agony, but of a sort of miserable sadness, self-pity, and remorse, like the wails of a child who had been yelled at by their father. The man did not resist the onslaught, but continued to writhe on the bed, as if purposefully laying himself out before the attacker. And as the attacker continued to chisel away at the man’s skull, it began to crack like porcelain and blood began to splash into his face and around the room like a fountain, and the man began to shiver more and more violently, until the shivering stopped, and with it the pitiful sobbing. Soon all that was left of the back of the man’s skull was a flowering of brain that blossomed out of the battered bone like a pulpy glue. He rubbed away some of the matter from his own face, and stood back, hyperventilating. If there had been a struggle, perhaps he would have felt some catharsis, but as he gazed over the stiffening body, it did not make him feel anything at all. He had killed a killer, and to him, all was fair. Yet as he continued to look, he saw the man’s pale, soft, youthful quality that, even as it was hardened in death, did not resemble that of a creature savage enough to murder another creature.

As he chopped up the man’s body using the saw in the man’s apartment that he supposed the man had himself used to divide the woman in his bathroom into fractions, he made careful attention not to look at the man’s face. He had never seen the face properly before and did not wish to do so now. For all he had been unaffected by his deed, he did not desire to become affected. And so, he piled up all the pieces into a black bin-bag when he was done and hauled the hefty bag over his shoulder and hobbled slowly out the door and down the staircase without a single resident to bother him. The city responded to the great sobs and wails of a dying man as indifferently as it seemed to respond to anything else. He dared to carry the body even onto the bus back home, because, in all likelihood, he had not so long ago witnessed another man pull off the same feat. The city was asleep and dreaming and its dreamers were sick and haunted. Monsters slipped through and by just as the rain did. And so he rode home with an abysmal stench in his wake, though he did not mind it, for it was a stench he had now become well acquainted with. The passengers he rode with did not even give him a glance, and as he looked around, he got the sense that they were just as dead as the slices of man slung over his back.

But something did linger on his mind. If he is to dispose of this body in the forest, as he had so planned, did it not also invite the disposal of another? The prospect daunted him. To finally take the act of removing her, burying her… he could hardly discern how it made him feel. Would it help him move on, or only exaggerate his loneliness? He supposed that it would allow for the bringing of guests to his apartment, but then who in this forsaken place would he ever wish to host?

He reached his apartment after a great struggle with the mighty weight on his back, yet as he approached he could hear the television playing inside, and that a pan was boiling, water was flowing, and cutlery was clinking. He could hardly stop in his steps, for he was already close to collapse with the body on his back. He knew that this was indeed his own apartment, but as far as he could hear, someone else had now taken up habitation inside. With an unparalleled terror tingling over him, he unlocked his door - for he found it locked - and he crept slowly inwards. Just as he did so, an awesome wave of lethargy washed over him and brought him to his knees, with the body-bag thudding to his side. As he drifted off to an immediate and spiraling sleep, he saw that his room was entirely empty and uninhabited, but his window was open.